The Right to Repair Medical Equipment in a Health Emergency: Australia Needs to Reform Its Patent Law

The right to repair is not merely a legal concept but is a matter of life or death when it comes to fixing critical medical devices in a health emergency like COVID-19. Time delays in accessing repair information and repair services may result in preventable loss of human lives. Hospitals cannot wait for days or even weeks for an authorized technician because patients cannot be made to wait if a ventilator or defibrillator goes down. In such a situation, healthcare providers, facing life-threatening logistical problems, cannot and should not rely on optional goodwill and benevolence of profit- driven manufacturing corporations. Corporations are expected to pursue profit- maximising strategies. They do not like competition and look for strategies to extract recurring revenue from their patent-protected products. They like to dominate markets by having exclusive rights and by extending their exclusive rights. It is duty of the Australian government to intervene through policy and legislative measures when the public interest is actually or potentially undermined, especially in times of emergencies.The COVID-19 crisis exposed vulnerabilities of supply chains and put global healthcare systems under critical strain. It highlighted the importance of 3D printing and the right to repair medical devices. The Australian government’s policy and legislative response is required to address the imbalance between the corporate interest and the public interest in the context of the right to repair. There are substantial barriers to repairing medical equipment even during a health emergency. There is a pressing need to think about the existing gaps or imbalances in Australia’s patent laws and policies. Patent rights should not be allowed to stand in the way of saving human lives. Australia needs to use the impetus of COVID-19 to reform its patent law. There is a pressing need to legislate a more robust and explicit right to repair and to provide explicit defences or exceptions for the right to repair medical devices in response to the current and future health crisis.